Ep. 15 - Skincare After 50: What Actually Works, What to Avoid & My AM/PM Routine

If your skin feels drier, more sensitive, or just different after 50, you’re not imagining it. Your skin changes in midlife — and the routine that worked in your 30s or 40s may not be what your skin needs now.

In this episode of Tea With Sophie, I’m breaking down what actually works for skincare after 50, what to avoid, and how to build a simple AM and PM routine that supports healthy, radiant skin.

We’ll talk about clean beauty, body burden, synthetic fragrance, sunscreen, double cleansing, vitamin C, ceramides, retinol, bakuchiol, peels, enzyme masks, and why moisture and barrier support are such a big deal for aging skin.

This isn’t about trying to look 30 again. It’s about caring for the skin you’re in — intelligently, consistently, and beautifully.

👉 Download Sophie’s Picks Special Guide here: https://sophieuliano.com/sophiespicksspecialguide/

And access even more free resources at SophieUliano.com/podcast

Transcript

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If you're a woman over 50 and you feel like your skin has completely changed, it's become drier, thinner, more sensitive, a little bit duller when you look at yourself in the mirror. Um, you're not imagining it. There are changes that happen, obviously, when we are postmenopausal. And so, in this episode of Tea with Sophie, I'm going to be going through exactly what is happening and what you can do about it. And you're gonna leave this episode with a very simple AMPM routine that will serve you extremely well in this next chapter of your life. Welcome to Tea with Sophie. I'm drinking a cup of tea here as usual, and tea is actually extremely good for your skin, particularly green tea because it's so full of polyphenols. But I drink all different kinds of skin-loving teas. And if you want to know more about teas, listen to episode one of Tea with Sophie because I do a big deep dive into tea right then. As a nutritionist, I this is the hill that I will die on when it comes to skin and your skin and your hair. The nutrition that you put in your body is everything. I literally could not do an episode on skincare without really underscoring this at the beginning. I have seen my skin get better. Obviously, I'm aging and I've got wrinkles and all of those things, but the actual quality of my skin, when I look at my skin and I go, is that a healthy, radiant-looking skin is better in terms of healthy radiance than when I was in my 40s? And I really, really put this down to my diet. Because here's the thing: if you are flooding your body and your cells with antioxidants from a plant-rich diet, and you're hydrating really, really well, you are going to see a massive difference in your skin. And so just by take changing your diet and what you drink, taking away the really heavy stuff, the saturated fat, the heavy oils, obviously, you know, too much sugar, obviously ultra-processed foods, and replacing these foods with beautiful, fresh, alive, colorful foods, minimizing or eliminating alcohol and instead hydrating with really beautiful, delicious, healthy beverages, I promise you, you're gonna see a massive difference in your skin. So that would be the first place that I would start. If you're like, mmm, the skin's look not looking great right now. Rather than going to the drugstore or the department store or Sephora or wherever else you go to get your beauty products, the first thing that you want to look at is how can I improve my lifestyle? Primarily the way I eat, what I drink, and also how I sleep and how I exercise, because all of those pillars are going to be reflected in the health of your skin. So your skin is your largest organ. Every single thing that you put on your skin is absorbed into your bloodstream. It's not fear mongering, it's biology, it's designed to keep the bad stuff out, it's designed to protect you. And there are certain chemicals, xenoestrogens, that are found in various um skincare products and other products around us. But really, I'm talking here very specifically about what you rub into your skin or spray on your skin. It can contain those xenoestrogen. Xeno means foreign estrogen, that means foreign estrogen, meaning your body doesn't recognize it as being a regular, it's not an estrogen. And it's a synthetic product which can disrupt your hormone system. So as we get older, we want to be very, very careful about what we put on our skin. And we want to avoid the main sources of the xenoestrogens, and there are some other ingredients that you really, really want to avoid. I wrote it, I've written about this extensively actually in many of my books. But when after 50, when our hormones are shifting, we become a lot more sensitive to everything we eat and we put on our skin. So we want to be very, very careful. We can't avoid all exposure, but skin exposure is one that we can directly control. Obviously, what we I think you want to start almost with the large, what you use the most of or covers the largest area of your skin, which is start with body lotions, start with the things that you use every day, if it's shampoo, if it's conditioner, if it's deodorant, if it's body lotion, that sort of thing. I have created an incredible guide for you for this episode. It's an extensive, comprehensive guide. I give you the list of ingredients that you want to try and avoid. And I have given you this is a labor of love that I because I knew that I would get questions of, well, what brand do you recommend for this, for this, for this? So I have created an incredible guide for you. We're going to drop it in the description, link in the description to YouTube, and it'll be on the podcast page if go if you're if you go to SophieUliano.com forward slash podcasts. So you're really going to want that as what once you've listened to this episode, you'll see why. But the first reason why is that I give you a list of the ingredients that I recommend that you avoid in personal care products. I will just call out one right off the top without going into this complex list, is that a perfume or fragrance is one ingredient you do want to uh try and avoid because it is a thylate, a class of chemicals called a thalate, which is an endocrine disruptor. And so products that are heavily perfumed or have any synthetic perfume in them, I really don't recommend, particularly body lotion, deodorant, spray on perfume, etc. You want to be very, very careful with that. Also, when you look at an ingredient label, very often in the ingredient label it'll say parfum slash fragrance. That's it. That's all it'll say. So you don't know that there are maybe a hundred and over two hundred chemicals just sitting underneath that one little label as a loop uh labeling loophole that they don't have to disclose all these hundreds of chemicals. So you want to look for products that are either fragrance-free or are fragrance with um real essential oils. So that's super important, not synthetic essential oils, but real essential oils. All right, so what happens to our skin after menopause? Now, estrogen drops, uh collagen elastin uh declines, which is why we get, you know, obviously we get more wrinkles. That's the that's what keeps the whole architecture together. Cell turnover slows, which um younger skin renews, I think is every 28 days. Postmenopausal skin slows down significantly, and that's why your skin can look a little bit more duller and rougher. Your skin can become a lot drier, everything dries out uh when our hormones change, when we're postmenopausal. The skin barrier thins as well and breaks. And when the skin barrier is compromised, you can have little tiny cracks that you can't even see, and moisture can escape, and irritation gets in, and then inflammation follows. So we really need to protect our skin barrier, and sensitivity very often increases. A lot of women come to me and they're like, I've got rosacea, I've got super sensitive skin. So you're gonna notice texture, wrinkles, uh, dark circles. Sometimes this is skin thinning, by the way. You think it's pigment, but it's skin thinning because the skin thinning shows the little veins underneath and it appears to be dark circles. You're often gonna see some pigmentation as well. Sun damage slowly starts, and very, well, I wouldn't even say slowly, in my case, rapidly becomes visible. And that could be sun damage from years and years ago. So suddenly you've got either melasma or you've got little dark spots and brown spots and all of that. Lovely stuff. So, what do we put on our skin? So everything absorbs, as I've already said. We want to be very, very careful and intentional. And I just want to say one little thing here. There is something known as the naturalistic fallacy. And this is in foot nutrition, and it is very much so in skincare as well. And what the naturalistic fallacy is, is that everything that is natural, and I'm doing air quote marks here, is healthier and is better. And that really isn't the case. If you think about it, things like poison ivy, and there's lots of things in nature that really aren't healthy, or we wouldn't eat them or put them on our skin. And so there's this great big thing of I only put on my skin what's completely natural and not synthetic. But I want to bust that fallacy a little bit here because we found that some of the safest and most effective skincare ingredients are actually synthetic, meaning they are made in a lab, they're synthesized in a lab. And because of that, they're safer, they are more stable. This is very much in the case of vitamin C products. And so don't sort of throw all that out and go, I only use completely quote unquote natural. There's the word natural is a little odd, it doesn't mean so much anyway, but um, you know, synthetic ingredients um can be extremely helpful and they can and they can be produced in a way that is absolutely a hundred percent safe, effective, and um, and is also safer for the environment as well. So, you know, we're all good with that. The one thing that I always look for, and this is just a personal thing because it aligns with my values, is that I absolutely want products that are cruelty-free. As an animal lover, passionate about animals, I could not even bear to think about an animal being harmed in any way, shape, or form for a product for me to put on my skin. And animal testing is still a very real thing. It is still going on. So I will always, you know, look as best as I can, dig into a company to check that they really are, you know, that they really don't test on animals in any stage of their production. Sometimes it's a little bit complicated and you can make mistakes sometimes because, you know, ingredients are sourced from here, there, and everywhere. But for the most part, that's what I really, really look out for. So if I ever recommend a product or if anything on my guide, you find out, it's like, oh, well, wait, there's this thing here that just let me know. Two really important things to rethink after 50 is one, moisture. Um, not just for your face, we obviously moisturizers, but for your whole body. So after menopause, your skin will become significant. Everything, as I said, dries out body-wide. So think neck, decollette, arms, legs, everything. You're this barrier, think of your skin as a barrier. It needs continuous support or it will break down. It's really interesting, actually, because Michael Grego, who's you know, been a mentor of mine for many, many years, Michael Doctor, uh, Dr. Michael Greger and written all how not to die, how not to age. He digs into clinical trials and the anti-aging creams. And what the research shows is that many results come down to the fact that skin is simply better moisturized, which makes sense, doesn't it? And then they do all these elaborate trials and everything. It's just, no, the skin was better moisturized. Um, so uh an independent product testing institute found that many anti-aging creams, and I want to get this right, uh, may work no better than a good basic moisturizer. It's the sort of often the psychological effect from spending more. Um, but the benefit of moisturizing really, really well and really consistently cannot be overlooked. I actually, I'm kind of not quite there with that because having done so much research on so many products, I think that there are products that have such incredibly elegant formulations with all the different hyaluronic acids and the beautiful products, squalin, and uh there's so many products that I think are, not I think that the evidence shows us that they can be enormously helpful to be put in a formulation. If you can afford those and if you can do those, then I say absolutely do it. Skin moisture, but every time you you you you don't want to just slap a bit of moisturizer on your body in the morning and go, well, I'm I'm I'm good to go. You actually want to moisturize as often as you can. Now, this is going to depend on where you live because, and for all your skincare, it's going to depend on where you live because it's when it's really humid outside, you obviously don't need so much moisturizer. So if you're living in Florida compared to if you're living in Southern California, I live in a desert, I am going to moisturize it every chance I get. I have moisturizers on my desk in my bathroom and my kitchen, whether I'm just standing around, I'm just my skin, literally just drinks up moisture like a sponge. And my skin literally looks old and lizardy if I'm not continually moisturizing it. So depending on where you live, if you live in certainly in a drier climate or northern, you know, winter where you've got the heating on a lot in that, because that really dries out your skin, just you know, pull up your arm sleeves, slap on some warm moisturizer, and um, and just make sure that's top, top, top of your list. That really is what changes. If there's one thing you take away from this episode, take away that. Also, sunscreen, um, I think the thing that we have to rethink is sunscreen. I a lot of you using sunscreen very, very well, but use it very, very, very, very well. There is not one single scientist, dermatologist, anybody on the planet who isn't just going to go, look, if there's one anti-aging tool that you should be using, it is a really solid sunscreen. Now, not all quote-unquote chemical sunscreens are bad. Again, the naturalistic fallacy thing comes a little bit into play here, but now the mineral sunscre screens, the ones that contain zinc oxide, are very can be very, very uh tight, zinc oxide and titanium uh dioxide um are very uh safe. Uh the formulas have improved dramatically. Just a little bit of a takeaway here is don't get obsessed with SPF 30 or SPF 50 because there's a tiny difference in actuality. The UVB um uh SPF uh of 30, let me get this right, blocks 97% of UB, UVB, and in 50, 98%. So it's a 1% difference, it's a little percent difference. But so you know, don't get too wigged out about oh, it's got to be a 50. 30, I generally use 30, sometimes 50 depending on the product. Um, it must say broad spectrum. That's the most important thing. Obviously, you know how to reapply it. And I would say for most, for most women, I would say use much more than you normally do. Like literally after this episode, literally double up. If you put like a dime size on your face, do two, and then make sure you're getting right into your hairline and you know, round your ears and your neck, and just really make sure that you're very, very well covered and double up certainly what you're putting on your body. Um, there is a little bit of evidence to show that if you have a history of skin cancer, which I do, not melanoma, but the I've had a lot of these little basal cells taken off. A neosinamide supplement could be very helpful, but you have to use it regularly. You have to use it every single day. I just take one every single day. Um, and um that is I'm it's a neosinamide, and it is you will be able to get a neosinamide supplement at the at any, you know, on Amazon or any drugstore. All of my sunscreen picks are in the guide. All right, so there's one more thing that I think it's worth really focusing on after 50, and and and if there are three things that I would say really focus on and double down on after 50, it would be moisturizing, sunscreen, and the third would be cleansing. I always recommend a double cleanse because when your skin can so easily get congested, and particularly when we're using a lot of moisturizers and sunscreens and neck creams and whatnot, I sometimes think, gosh, I put these layers of things on in my skin in the day. I've got my serum, I've got my moisturizer, my sunscreen, then I'm reapplying sunscreen, then I'm doing a powder sunscreen. That requires a double cleanse. I am not going to get my skin clean. It will be congested if I'm not doing a double cleanse. And I think this is true for almost everybody. And then a little bit of makeup on top of that. So with your double cleanse, the evening you, and at night, this is only at night. You do not need to do a double cleanse in the morning, only at night. The first part of the cleanse would be a hot face cloth cleanse where you use a creamy, um, sort of emollient. Sometimes they're jellies, sometimes they're cream-based um cleanser that literally melts off the gunk, the sunscreen, the makeup, the grime and the dirt. It melts it off. Then you use a hot face cloth. I put a few drops of essential oil on my little piles of face cloth. So when I put them under hot water, they smell really nice. Also, essential oil is antimicrobial as well. So I love all of that. Um, and then you're gonna wash that off, rinse it really well, wash it off again, then you're gonna do your second cleanse. And for my second cleanse, I'll use a gentler cleanser. Um, I have all sorts of different cleansers that I love. I use one that isn't quite so creamy, quite so emollient, is a little bit more of a quote unquote refining cleanser. I do the hot cloth again, and then I'm good to go. Now, the thing that I do not use unless in a pinch I'm traveling, camping, or something like that, is those cleansing cloths, those micella cleansing cloths. I know they're useful, I know they're really convenient, but they don't cleanse properly. It's just like rubbing your gunk over your skin. And you will find that if you just did that, you're not, you're not gonna get there. You're not gonna get in all the little crevices. It just feels to me, leaves a slightly slimy residue, which I don't like. So I'll only use those in a pinch. So let's just recap now. The biggest things to revisit after 50 for beautiful glowing skin. Number one, your diet and what you eat and what you drink. And then the three skincare things are gonna be moisture, you're taking it up next level, your moisture, sunscreen, you're taking it up next level, cleansing, you're taking, you're leveling up that, you're leveling up those three things. Those three things alone and changing your diet, you will see a massive difference. Okay, now I'm gonna do the AM and PM routine. So, AM routine, um, I use a vitamin C serum, absolutely swear by a vitamin C serum. When I really started using one religiously, it changed my skin. It's antioxidant, it is brightening, it is supports collagen production, it is so, so important. You need to make sure it's a really good brand, meaning that they're using a really stable form of vitamin C, of aloscobic acid, or whatever form that they're using is very unstable in of itself. So if you have a product and it's turned brown or orange or it's past its sell-by date, then you must throw it away. You can look at the sell-by date of any skincare product by turning it over. There should be a little open sort of uh jar icon on the bottom and it'll say six months or 12 months. And that means six months or 12 months after opening shelf life. Pay attention to that. What I do is when I get the product, I get a little Sharpie and I write the date that I opened it because otherwise I will totally forget. And I'll pick it on and I'll go, wait, how long have I had this for? So there's a little tip for you. Um, so vitamin C goes on in the morning. I don't cleanse in the morning, I just get in the shower, let the water run over my face, pat my skin dry. Serum goes on. Then I might use another serum. Sometimes I do use a peptide serum. There are some incredible peptide serums. Uh, peptide is collagen signaling. You want to look mainly for Matrixol 3000. I have some really good recommendations on my guide. Then goes the moisturizer. You want to look for hyaluronic acids, squalene, shea, ceramides. These are the sort of ingredients that you want to look for in a really good moisturizer. You could, and this is what I really love, is I go for a multi-functional day cream with SBF in it. So there are so many amazing ones. A lot of them, my favorites, again, I've put on the guide. But I love to have it's almost like I think back in the day it was called a BB cream, but basically it's a multi-functional product. It has moisturizer, it has sunscreen in it, it has a little bit of cover-up, a little bit of glow, a little colour, some of them, some of them have more cover than others. Um, it might have uh niacinamide built in, squalin built in, SBF built in, etc. If you find a good one and you fall in love with it, it's just, it just cuts down the time of your routine. And I have a couple that I absolutely love and have been using religiously over the years. Some that I don't love, but the ones that I love are on the guide. And then if that product doesn't have sunscreen in it, then you would put sunscreen in top on top. I will say something that I absolutely love are these little sunscreen powder sticks. Again, a couple of brands that I'll recommend that I recommend on that guide. And I think one is SBF 30, one is SBF 50. I'm obsessed with them because what I don't want to do is reapply a goopy sunscreen on top of my makeup as the day goes on. So what I love to do instead is put this little powder thing in my purse. It's a little brush and one in my glove compartment and my car so that all through the day, it's like a little, it's actually a setting powder. And then I can just put that on and I am good to go. So I highly recommend those. And you can take the beauty, is that you can take those right up to the hairline, if not a little bit on the hairline as well. And then when it's sunny outside, I'm, you know, wearing a hat as well. You can also dust it on your hands when you're in the car. Okay, so that's uh morning routine. Now let's get quickly with the PM routine. So Double cleanse, which I've just gone over, won't go over it again. And then you might want to use a retinol product. Now, retinol isn't for absolutely everybody. I use a retinol product. I have done for many years. The downside of a retinol product is that it makes your skin much more photosensitive. So I have to be even more religious about sunscreen when I first started using retinol. It's not for everybody. If you have really inflamed skin, if you have rosacea, if you have broken skin, if you've got certain skin issues, then it's probably not going to work for you to use a retinol. There are some sort of plant-based alternatives that might work for you, which I'll talk about in a second. There are lots of different strengths of retinol. So there is the prescription strength, which is the tritinoin, which you have to get for a prescription from a doctor. That is the most, that's the strongest one. No conversion necessary is 20 times stronger than the over-the-counter retinol. I'll say that once again, it is 20 times stronger. So if you're going to use it, you want to introduce it very, very slowly. And probably your skin will go through an acclimatization period where you'll have dry patches, peeling, redness. You have to kind of live with that for a while, and then your skin gets you used to it. But if you want to go down that route, you definitely need to talk to a dermatologist and really find out if it's a good fit for you. Then there's retinal. That requires one conversion step. It is 10 times stronger than retinol. It is uh than retinol. It is more potent than retinol. I'll get to retinol in a minute, but it is way, way gentler than tritinoin. Okay. And so that is a choice as well. Then we get to retinol. Now, retinol is what most of you on over-the-counter products will use. Two conversion steps necessary for it to convert in your skin. Um, the most common over-the-counter form, it you'll find it'll start at 0.25% and it'll go all the way up to 1%, 1% being the highest. And sometimes you'll want to start with a much lower percentage, like 0.25, and work your way up maybe to three percent, you know, to 0.3% and then up to 1%. Um, I uh what I should have said is why retinol? Well, retinol actually increases skin cell turnover um quite significantly. And that's why women sometimes see a really different uh great difference in skin texture when they start using um retinol products. Um, I certainly have done. Um so then there are retinal esters. Uh, this takes three conversion steps, and it could be a good introduction for very sensitive skin. And if retinol is not right for you because you've got very sensitive and inflamed skin, then you might want to look for, you see, there's a lot in some really good um green beauty brands, and some I mentioned some products in the guide here, and you're looking for an ingredient called Bacucial, it's from the uh Babchi plant, uh clinically studied based alternative. It delivers retinol-like benefits, improved texture, reducing fine lines, but with a lot less irritation. So that could be a really good choice. Results are gentler, you know, obviously not so significant and slower, but it is a really, really good alternative, right? It's not just marketing. I wanted to tell you that. So you would then, after your cleanse, you would then on very dry skin, you're going to put on your retinal product if you're using it. Um, you could use a peptide cream or a peptide serum instead, if you just didn't want to use a retinol cream at all or a retinal product. And then you're going to put on your night cream containing ceramides, peptides, plant oils, all that beautiful good stuff. And there are some amazing recommendations in my guide. All right, we're almost there. Exfoliance and peels. Be careful. Mix science on harsh chemical peels. I'd be very, very careful. I prefer an enzyme peel, um, is a gentle alternative. Fruit enzyme peels such as pumpkin and papaya. They digest the dead skin uh without the acids, much kinder to the skin barrier. There's one in particular that I love and use once a month. Again, I'll pop that in there. It's actually, I'll tell you right now, it's actually Sunshine Botanicals that I love. Pumpkin power peel, enzyme-based, not chemical, is wonderful. Uh, sheet masks, fun once in a while, but not a lot of research to show that they are better than actually applying product to your skin. Um, okay, I think that's it really. Deodorants, um, fragrance-free. Notice that there is a difference, obviously, between an antiperspirant and an actual deodorant because uh antiperspirants to stop you sweating will contain aluminum salts for the most part. You'll see my pics on the guide. And then um, makeup. I love makeup. It's just one of those little pleasures in life. It's I call it the icing on the cake. First nutrition and lifestyle, sleep, sleep, sleep, hydration, hydration, hydration, amazing food, flooding your body with antioxidants. That is number one. And then skincare, as I've just gone through, and then the icing on the cake. And now there are so many beautiful, clean beauty products that do not contain the fragrance and the xenoestrogens and all the crap on there, and they're not tested on animals. And I absolutely love, love um playing with makeup every put me in a good, great, uh, clean beauty store, and I'm like a kid in a candy store. It's just a lot of fun. So um, hopefully, you have found this episode useful. Everything I talked about today, every product, every brand, full ingredient list of what to avoid is in the Sophie's Pix special guide, completely free. And you can click your links um in the description of YouTube or go to SophieUliano.com forward slash podcast, and you'll find everything you need there. All right, that's it for this episode of Tea with Sophie. I got through that quicker than I thought I would. Hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you on the next episode of Tea with Sophie.